This is a stupid thing to be annoyed about, but at the same time…

My mother and stepfather watch TV… mostly stuff about dogs (lawl) but also, well… let me put it this way, please tell me I’m not the only person who finds the thought of a 65 year old man being a fanboy for Ugly Betty, or just about any show meant for younger people for that matter, to be just a BIT creepy. (If you saw last night’s SNL with the middle-aged dude who was a fanboy for Zac Efron, that’s not too far off.)

But that’s not what bothers me.

It’s how my mother calls just about every woman who makes any sort of sexually-motivated comment a slut. And she says it like it’s something to laugh about. It’s odd because she’s otherwise squeamish about swearing.

They were watching some dog training program, and there was a demo on how to greet an unfamiliar dog… afterwards, the lady was chatting it up with the owner and playfully asked “can I pet YOU?” I shall translate this into internet for simplicity’s sake.

Mother: OMG. SLUT! lol
Evil Stepfather: lol XD
Yoshi: o.O;;; okay, was that really necessary?
Mother: y so srs? killjoy >:(

I know there are bigger things to be all “argh STOP IT” about (like, oh, mother’s inability to think anything through, or her “I can throw you away at any time” view), but this is just as much a “nails on a blackboard” moment. Yes, mother hates people and can’t be bothered to go outside and put SOME attempt into making friendly with the neighbors because, now, she thinks they’ll all call animal control on her (though she still claims it’s my fault the neighbors hate us because I’m so ugly), but, come on… is it REALLY necessary to call women sluts like it’s something cute and funny? That’s just really tasteless and unfunny.

But, what do I know? I can’t even confront mother over that because I’m “too serious,” yet it’s okay for her to be silly all the time without considering the consequences of her actions, so it’s not like my opinion counts for anything here…

Bleh.

Specifically, the one about assuming my mother has anything resembling logic or reason.

She bought another white bulldog.

….

Yeah. You heard me.
Snowflake’s been gone less than a week, and… well, Pigeon demonstrates his amazing powers of seeing the future.

Gently mentioning “isn’t this a bit too soon?” sailed right over mother’s head. And then some, as her response is more like a kick in both the face and the pants: “I missed having a little female wandering around.”

I… um… wow.
I don’t know whether to be greatly offended at the confirmation that I really don’t matter anymore (and believe me, I really don’t need to feel any more alone and abandoned than I already do), or just disgusted at how completely unreasonable the whole situation is.

Mother was laughing off Octomom on the news. WTF. Does my mother not get that she’s the bulldog version of Nadya Suleman?

—

In other news, on Tuesday I slipped in the shower. My tankiness worked in my favor for the most part since it was more “roll” than “fall” but my upper left arm has a giant-ass bruise from having plowed into the trash can, and that’s pretty much kept me out of volunteer service for at least this week… hopefully it dies down by next week. Sore as hell. Ow.

/t Evil Stepfather,

If you are going to bark at me to put MLB score widgets on your laptop-that-you-really-don’t-need, do not bark at me if it turns out half of them don’t work at all, and the other half don’t let me specify which team to stalk (never mind that the season hasn’t even STARTED yet). No, I don’t know how to code Vista Sidebar widgets, I cannot magically write one that will stream your sports.

Ripping out all the bloatware and Dell crap on this thing was bad enough, I did not need to get barked at because I don’t care about baseball and sports in general. On top of that I was hungry and by the time I got upstairs, all the bulbs on my ceiling fan (which, aside from the glow of my monitors, is the only source of lighting in the room) had apparently burned out between my leaving for volunteer service and getting back. No significant lighting, um, kinda makes it not safe to operate my toaster oven.

(I cannot cook downstairs. Not because there are almost always puppies running amok, it’s just that my coming in, no matter how quiet, causes them to perk up and go berserk, barking in a collective frenzy, and I get barked at by Evil Stepfather for it because he can’t hear his precious sports and TV. The dogs REALLY need more obedience training because their conduct is, just, really absurdly apalling but, of course, mother just can’t be bothered to do it, even after I offered to pay for in-house lessons.)

It’s 1am and thus too late to cook anyway (even if I could see anything in here outside of the limited range of monitor glow, the beep of my toaster oven would send the dogs into a barking frenzy)… I didn’t even get to finish inking Celina because laptop-tweaking took too long.

I think tomorrow, everyone is going out for a good, long time, though. Sure, I could easily flee while nobody’s looking (and I have Dinah back in working order so I could ramen it up anywhere)… but I like my alone time with my big orange furball, too.

—

Go go Keith Olbermann, way to freaking PWN Ann Coulter. I LOLed when he busted out the diploma. XD

This made me smile after having to deal with mother and Evil Stepfather’s dumbassery.

Permit me to commit a bit of grand theft Keith Olbermann here, because my mother once again demonstrates her lack of common sense and thus takes all 3 slots for Ayarane Project’s Worst Persons.

She went with Evil Stepfather to process taxes and such…. okay… and now I get a call telling me that she’s buying Evil Stepfather a laptop so he can listen to his ball games through the MLB website.

Um…

…we have XM radio. And they have lots of sports channels and while I am generally ignorant to sports, I know enough that the particular teams Evil Stepfather follows are covered by these channels. We actually, you know, have a couple extra XM units, perfectly portable… they have these things called headphone jacks, and Evil Stepfather could just plug in some headphones and go to his baseball happy place.

Failing that, if he MUST go through MLB’s streaming service… we also have two computers that I built that are hardly being used. Sure, Evil Stepfather may have had half his right foot lopped off, but he can walk just fine. Is it that much trouble to walk over to one of the unused computers? (And he’s far more computer-literate than he claims, he knows enough to get around the Netflix website, and back when he was actually working he would send emails and such through the post office intranet.)

Seriously… WHY does this man need a laptop? I mean, if we didn’t have any of the above I suppose it would make sense to give him one, but this is quite absurd. Aside from sports radio and netflix, the man is not really interested in computers. Hell, most of his waking hours is just vegging out in front of the TV (because in his mind, retirement entitles him to sit on his ass all day and be a jerk– it’s easier to pull teeth or get Neo to play a non-Kit character than it is to get Evil Stepfather to, um, get up and actually interact with any of these $2000 bulldogs).

Oh, and for even more lulz, mother is trying to weasel her way out of slapping an extended warranty on it. Now THAT is really boneheaded. If Evil Stepfather’s going to be using this in the main den while the dogs are out and about, he can count on them slobbering all over the laptop or chewing on the cables or even knocking it off his lap when they jump up on him (despite his half-assed attempts to discipline them).

When I tried to confront mother on her lack of forethought into any of this, she suddenly claimed bad signal quality and hung up on me. Apparently she’s not interested in common sense and sanity anymore. (This on top of, you know, killing all our premium channels to save money yet coming home a few hours later with dog costumes that were never used, or trying to get me to eat massive cancellation penalties to kill off pet insurance before the contract is up so she won’t have to pay me $200 a month.) Oh, and I’m expected to do the initial configuration on this machine, so I’ll probably have to drop library service today because I just know she’s going to throw a hissyfit if I make her wait until after.

Yoshi’s mother: today’s worst person in the world.

Um… hi. What started with taking Dinah into the shop to have her “lol red snow” display looked at turned into mother suddenly being stricken by “new machine fever” and next thing I know, we’re hopping freeways to get to Fry’s in Industry.

Yes, she has two machines, one of which she hardly touches because it is not within immediate earshot of puppies. Yes, she COULD just move that less-used machine over into the den, so she can bum around on the internets near said puppies. But… nope, she wanted a new one, with a quad-core processor (AMD thankfully, because I hate installing Intel, their CPU fans irritate the crap out of me) and a Blu-Ray burner. (Never mind that blank media for that is still expensive as hell right now. MUST HAVE ANYWAY.)

All new parts, and pretty powerful ones too, so this was not going to be a cheap machine… but mother’d just gotten her TSP payout from the Post Office and gosh darnit, she was gonna splurge on parts even if the world ended tomorrow. Yay. No, seriously, she was all “This is probably the last machine I’ll ever own, so I want a really good one!” like she’s gonna die in a month or something. Oi… I TOTALLY reserve the right to laugh at mother if she comes to me in, what, 4 years and tells me she wants to rebuild one of her other machines with the latest and greatest. Ya rly.

Also WTF mother why did you have to pick the $400 blu-Ray drive when you could have gotten an equivalent drive for $250? (One of them is LG, the other is Sony. Guess which one is the Sony drive. >_>) I know there is brand loyalty, but geeze…

Oh, the best part is when we hit the checkout. Apparently, mother forgot that her debit card has a spending cap of $1000, even if used as a credit card emulator. To save her the embarassment of having to put back half the parts so we can come back tomorrow for the rest I ended up eating half of the total cost (I probably shouldn’t have, she really needs to stop jumping on shinies without THINKING, but at this point I was really tired and just wanted this done, not to mention she immediately put back that $1000 and as soon as the transfer console resets I’ll get the $800 I’m owed for 4 months worth of back-contributions for pet insurance). If this were an episode of Countdown this would instantly get mother tapped for WORST PERSON IN THE WOOOOOORLD.

*ahem*

So, um… now I am home, and as soon as mother finishes feeding Evil Stepfather and the Pups of the Apocalypse and clears a spot, I’ll be assembling this monster. I’ll post specs if anyone cares, but it’s basically the same mobo as Synergy 2 with Blastoise’s video card (and, you know, a Blu-Ray drive).

Sometimes I wonder if my mother is, you know, the puppies-and-PCs version of the octuplets’ mother. As in, replace compulsion to have more babies with compulsion to buy more puppies/build new machines for the sake of doing those things. Hm…